We WON! We Won the Annenberg Innovation Lab Crunch Design Challenge!

UPDATE: WE WON!! We took first place in Transmedia Story Telling and our project will be featured at TEDxUSC! Click around links below for more info! Like this one:

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/04/check_out_student_work_from_an.html#

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I am happy to say I joined up with a GREAT team to work on the CRUNCH! Interactive Design Challenge at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. My  team consists of Project Lead extraordinaire Lauren Fenton, Programmer cover boy Shreyas Heranjal, myself — Desdemona Bandini as Project Manager, and the amazing Annenberg and SCA Faculty Advisor Anne Balsamo.

Our team’s project is called “The Interactive GeoSurface Map.”  It uses an interactive device created by Onomy Labs called a “Tilty Table.” The table functions as an interactive interface to create an experience of playful navigation through Microsoft’s Bing Map database of high-resolution satellite images . By tilting and twisting the Tilty Table, the user can zoom in and pan over details of the landscape. By dwelling on hotspots they can access multimedia metadata on important landmarks.

As an interface meant for public spaces and public use in museums, galleries, community centers, and municipal buildings, the Tilty Table offers a unique means of apprehending geography, land use and infrastructure not only as a collection of data but as a communal experience of embodied travel through a virtual space. As opposed to interfaces designed for individual experiences only, The Interactive GeoSurface map is about collaborate browsing, allowing viewers to engage with each other over the data.

We are collaborating with an institution called the Center for land Use Interpretation to adapt their exhibit, Urban Crude, about the Oil Fields of the city of Los Angeles, for the Tilty Table. Urban Crude explores the way oil is being drilled in the city, by whom, and what their strategies are to hide this drilling activity from plain view, which includes hiding oil wells behind fake buildings or churches. The exhibit contains images and text as well as geographical data that weaves a narrative around this particular example of land use.

What distinguishes The Interactive GeoSurface Map project from other interfaces for vizualizing geographical data (for example, Google Earth), is that we don’t just present data, we present a narrative about the data. The user can explore a story, rather than just a collection of facts. The story we are presenting is about geography and land use, and how these topics relate to us as urban dwellers and citizens.

As such, it is an ideal tool for any institution that is involved with thinking about geography in a creative and interesting way – our potential audience includes museums, science centers, schools, community centers, and any institution involved in urban planning.

“What distinguishes The Interactive GeoSurface Map project from other interfaces for vizualizing geographical data (for example, Google Earth), is that we don’t just present data, we present a narrative about the data. The user can explore a story, rather than just a collection of facts. The story we are presenting is about geography and land use, and how these topics relate to us as urban dwellers and citizens.”